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STORY
The lion, the mouse... and the voice of youth

You remember it well, the joy of peeling away the glossy, sparkling, brightly-coloured sticker from the lightly laminated sheet and proudly placing it on your school exercise book. The more stickers you had, the better… and on social media platform Viber it seems it’s no different. Just like traditional stickers, the ones you find on Viber are graphics used to convey greetings and moods. So, we brought together young people, Viber and a friendly lion and mouse to see how we could use sticker power to amplify the voice of youth.

With one billion Viber users in 193 countries,[1] 30% of active Viber users send a sticker every day.[2] This sparked an idea – could we use Viber stickers to promote U-Report, engaging more youth? It turns out we can. Within 10 days of launch in May 2019, over 110,000 Viber users became U-Reporters, with 250,000 young people downloading the U-Report sticker pack. How Pawsome is that?

Viber stickers

So how did we make sure that what we were designing was relevant to young people? In short, we included our U-Family in the process. Having worked with Viber, capitalizing on their in-depth knowledge of what kind of stickers work well, we asked existing U-Reporters for their feedback on the animal-based designs, and in particular what kind of captions or themes we should include. Over 3,500 U-Reporters fed into the process with additional input from key partner Girl Guides. Thanks to our U-Family we’ve got stickers showing study buddies, being kind and spreading love not hate

So how did we make sure that what we were designing was relevant to young people? In short, we included our U-Family in the process. Having worked with Viber, capitalizing on their in-depth knowledge of what kind of stickers work well, we asked existing U-Reporters for their feedback on the animal-based designs, and in particular what kind of captions or themes we should include. Over 3,500 U-Reporters fed into the process with additional input from key partner Girl Guides. Thanks to our U-Family we’ve got stickers showing study buddies, being kind and spreading love not hate.

U-Report polls for the sticker creation

UNICEF/U-Report

We’re extremely excited to see where our lion and mouse stickers go next. Iraq and France will be launching their adaptions of our U-Report mouse and lion sticker pack soon, and the packs are available to all countries that have Viber integrated with U-Report. If in ten days we’ve ensured that over 110,000 young people are able to raise their voice thanks to this innovative sticker pack partnership, we’re really excited to see where this could lead! As U-Report mouse says: Great work!

Viber stickers

[1] https://www.viber.com/about/

[2] https://expandedramblings.com/index.php/viber-stats/

Sticker images courtesy of Viber

See by the numbers how we are engaging youth voices for positive social change.
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